発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo

← Hakken 週ごとのアーカイブ

Visual Atelier 8

Snøhetta opens Shanghai Grand Opera House with sweeping rooftop

10月20日

Snøhetta connects architecture and public space at Shanghai Grand Opera House Snøhetta has completed the Shanghai Grand Opera House, a major cultural venue located along the Huangpu River in…

Visual Atelier 8で読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Snøhetta opens Shanghai Grand Opera House with sweeping rooftop

Visual Atelier 8の他の記事

Arc’teryx revives Sidewinder jacket for 25th anniversary Visual Atelier 8

Tesla Roadster design: Performance, Thrust and Rocket Visual Atelier 8

BIG wins competition for Tirana Fountain Plaza in Albania Visual Atelier 8

Porsche Mission S introduces a new design direction for future sports cars Visual Atelier 8

On and Roger Federer stage floating tennis court and drone show in Shenzhen Visual Atelier 8

Deta Studio designs Chaise Longue 120° with neo-brutalist geometry Visual Atelier 8